What I Watched In 2014

I started this last year feeling like I was losing touch with my love of movies, so I started an experiment. If I spent time to watch a movie, whether or not I had seen it before, I wrote it down.

For your consideration, here’s the occasionally annotated list. This isn’t a critical analysis. This isn’t breaking down my viewing patterns for data. But it’s my way of measuring how I chose to love movies this past year.

Note: Titles in italics are movies I have watched before.

1 – Star Wars

The plan was to watch this on New Year’s Eve and sync the destruction of the Death Star with midnight. We even got Star Wars party plates. However, the night wound up involving a lot of other activities and Star Wars was bumped to the morning.

No complaints. A good way to start the new year.

2 – The Empire Strikes Back

Of course we put in Empire after Star Wars finished. It was New Year’s Day (the day of zero expectations or obligations).

3 – Europa Report

4 – L’Argent

This was a movie I’d meant to watch for years. Back in school we watched a short clip of the movie that emotionally devastated me. If you watch this, wait for the scene with the woman carrying coffee, and you’ll understand.

5 – Mean Streets

6 – Grosse Pointe Blank

This movie will always have a special place in my heart, both as a Michigan ex-pat and a lover of 80s music. In high school I could quote this movie chapter and verse, and found that I could still remember a surprising amount of it.

7 – Frances Ha

This was the first real discovery of the year. When the movie finished, I was full of a sense of total, ecstatic joy.

8 – Her

Just when I thought I’d seen every idea they could explore based on the premise, they found a new wrinkle to exploit. It had been a long time since I had felt such a genuine sense of surprise while watching something.

9 – Planes, Trains & Automobiles

Yes, I had never seen this entire movie. It was always shown as clips in classes and somehow I never got around to it. Well, I fixed that. And I am so glad I did.

10 – The Aristocats

11 – Waitress

I have no excuses for why it took me so long to see this. It’s a well-crafted story that prominently features pie. That should have made it an immediate must-see.

12 – Tangled

13 – The Avengers

14 – Up!

If the first act of this film doesn’t make you cry, you’re a replicant.

15 – Mitt

I wanted more. A big part of the desire to watch this film was to think about a person not just in terms of their politics. And I felt like it came up short, both in running time and in my sense of feeling like I could see past the election.

16 – Frozen

There’s a lot of praise for this movie, and a lot of bile spilled about what it’s metastasized into.

But when something becomes popular, it’s always for a genuine reason. If you could force a majority of people to like a film or a song, the game would be over. The formula would be there and we’d buy whatever was being sold to us. But that’s not the case.

Anything popular got there because it resonated with the audience. Something that resonates as strongly as this film deserves appreciation and study.

17 – The Great Mouse Detective

18 – The Mark of Zorro (1920)

19 – Moonrise Kingdom

20 – Newsies

Once again, how had I waited this long to see this? Worth the wait since it allowed me to imagine it as an alternate Batman Begins.

21 – Ghostbusters

I love this movie. This isn’t the nostalgia of a kid who owned the firehouse playset for his giant tub full of Ghostbusters action figures. This movie holds up under the most intense, post-film school scrutiny.

22 – Pacific Rim

If you weren’t already aware of some of the reasons I love this movie, check out this previous post on it.

23 – Man of Tai Chi

I’m a sucker for Keanu Reeves movies and a sucker for martial arts films. This was satisfactory.

24 – The World’s End

25 – Computer Chess

I felt like it had been too long since I’d watched something strange. This film did not disappoint.

26 – Dogtooth

I was still feeling the need for something bizarre, and this film completely satisfied that desire.

27 – Veronica Mars

28 – Frozen

Haters to the left. I really dug this one.

29 – Good Will Hunting

30 – Shut Up And Play The Hits

31 – Captain America: The Winter Soldier

This movie is the litmus test for whether or not you think Marvel’s Cinematic Universe is working. It united plot threads from other stories the way The Avengers united Marvel’s characters.

32 – All Is Lost

I stayed up past my bedtime to watch this. I was that into it. I’m a sucker for films that let you absorb process and detail. A master class in escalating tension.

33 – Annie (1982)

34 – The Empire Strikes Back

35 – Romancing the Stone

36 – The Muppets Take Manhattan

37 – Matilda

Some friends stopped by with a copy of this and ice cream sundaes the night I was planning to watch the next movie on the list. I decided to go along with their plan instead, and I was not disappointed.

38 – Man of Steel

Everything I had been told from friends and the internet suggested that I would not find anything to like about this movie.

Turns out that was wrong. The scenes between Pa Kent and the young Clark were moving, and Amy Adams makes a great Lois Lane. It didn’t completely win me over, but it did remind me not to judge a movie by its spoilers.

39 – Le Samourai

See previous comments about loving movies that show process and detail. If you want a great noir about a hitman, look no further.

40 – Godzilla (2014)

I already covered this film (and the original Godzilla) in detail in a previous post.

41 – X-Men: Days of Future Past

If you don’t think that anybody knows how to offer a sincere apology anymore, watch this film. It’s a feature length mea culpa for X-Men 3.

42 – Hook

43 – X-Men

44 – X2 – X-Men United

45 – Assault on Precinct 13

46 – Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

47 – Home Alone

48 – An Autumn Afternoon

49 – Pillow to Post

50 – Boy Meets Girl

Let us never forget that James Cagney was a terrific comedic actor.

51 – Contact

There’s too much going on with this movie and my reactions to it to slip into here. It would make an intense double feature with Interstellar.

52 – The Great Muppet Caper

53 – Pacific Rim

No, seriously. I love this movie.

54 – Popeye

This was one of the stranger movies I watched this year, and that’s saying something. Delightfully strange, though.

55 – Johnny Mnemonic

See previous comments about Keanu Reeves, plus loving 90s representations of cyberspace and computer hacking.

56 – Mean Girls

57 – Guardians of the Galaxy

58 – The Lego Movie

My wife said it best: “This movie has no right to be as good as it is.”

59 – Intolerable Cruelty

60 – The Third Man

A movie very close to my heart that I’ve already written about here.

61 – Duel At Diablo

62 – The Grand Budapest Hotel

63 – The Lego Movie

Seriously. This movie had no right to be this good.

64 – Boyhood

A total gut punch. Maybe it was because I was soon to be a parent when I saw it, filled with hopes and fears. Maybe it was the way the actors grew into their relationships with one another. Or maybe it was Patricia Arquette’s final scene in the film, and the way it just cuts away, leaving you unresolved to her sense of emptiness and exhaustion.

65 – The Wild Bunch

66 – What About Bob?

Yet another one for the running theme of “How have I not already watched this?”

67 – Oldboy (2013)

68 – A History of Violence

69 – Sneakers

70 – Kill Bill Vol. 1

71 – Captain America: The Winter Soldier

72 – Return of the Jedi

73 – Singin’ in the Rain

Stop reading right now and watch this movie. I don’t care how many times you’ve seen it already. It is always worth watching. I’ll wait for you to finish.

74 – Zero de Conduite

75 – The Baron of Arizona

76 – Southland Tales

I took a religious studies class with Professor Ralph Williams my freshman year of college. In one lecture, Prof. Williams said, “If you truly want to understand a religion, look for the thing which it pains them to affirm, but they affirm it nonetheless.”

I love this movie, but I should not.

It is a mess. It has digression on top of digression. It requires extra-textual reading to understand large chunks of it. It’s meta to a fault. And yet…

It’s sprawling and ambitious. It’s full of individual moments that stick in your brain. Lines of dialogue that bear repeating (“I’m a pimp, and pimps don’t commit suicide.”). It is too full of ideas and imagination. Too full of potential. It’s like the scene from Alien: Resurrection with the failed Ripley clones, but the scientists were trying to splice Saturday Night Live and Philip K. Dick.

I should not love this movie, but I do.

77 – Jackie Brown

78 – Star Trek Into Darkness

79 – Sleeping Beauty

There are few animated films as beautiful as this. The commentary track is insightful and entertaining in its own right.

80 – The Muppets

81 – Clue

82 – Batman (1989)

I forgot how many people Batman kills in this movie. It’s a lot.

Batman may have a no kill rule, but you don’t for one moment believe Michael Keaton would. Keaton’s Batman is unhinged and desperate in a way that other screen versions wouldn’t touch. He plays up the sense of how damaged a person would have to be to think that the best way to avenge their parents’ would be to use their vast fortune to go out and punch criminals one at a time. Keaton makes you believe that his Bruce Wayne would have no issues with that logic.

83 – Interstellar

This is a movie that demands to be seen on a movie screen (though not necessarily an IMAX). It’s a beautiful machine. You can marvel at its quality and precision.

But for all its solid qualities, it’s not that ambitious. It plays out like almost all of Christopher Nolan’s movies: A star-studded long con. It’s successful and assured, but conventional. It teases connections to 2001 without attempting to be its equal.

And yet, that may be enough. These are creative people working at the top of their game. Few working now do it better or more consistently.

84 – Muppet Christmas Carol

85 – Wreck-It Ralph

I expected this to be a decent movie that would play on my video game nostalgia, but what I got was well-crafted and clever.

86 – Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever

I don’t watch a lot of things that I know will be bad at this point. It used to be normal to look for things that were so bad they were almost good.

In college, a group of friends had a standing competition where we’d go to a video store, split into two teams, and each pick an awful horror movie. The team that found the better bad film (there were objective criteria, including number of on-screen fatalities) were the winners.

It seemed like we had so much time to burn.

Maybe watching a movie we knew would be bad, and that was constructed to be bad so that it could poke fun at itself, was a way of reclaiming that sense of time to kill. To willingly give up time for something silly and ridiculous.

But that’s a silly reason to watch something this bad.

87 – Galaxy Quest

88 – Miracle on 34th Street

It’s so easy to write this one off as just another Santa Claus film, but there’s something incredible in its construction: A cynical world conspires despite itself to prove the existence of Santa.

Every single person, other than Santa himself, has some kind of angle in play. From the judge who doesn’t want to dismantle his political aspirations to the mail room clerk who wants to get a bunch of old letters to Santa out of storage, everybody has their reasons.

So even though the message of the movie is about how faith involves believing in something that reason tells you not to, the majority of the characters are telling a different story. One where they’re willing to accept a lie or an impossibility just to make their lives easier.

But we get to feel, in the end, that the joke’s on them. Spoilers: He really was Santa Claus. Imagine the philosophical payload of this film if that wasn’t the case.

89 – Moonrise Kingdom

90 – White Christmas

Yes, it’s a Christmas movie. But it’s not specifically about Christmas. It just happens at Christmas. It’s really a comedy about soldiers returning to life at home.

It’s no The Best Years of Our Lives. It’s not playing for raw emotion and pathos. It’s light and full of musical numbers. But the story could substitute a different holiday and still (essentially) work. It’s not a movie trying to make some big point about Christmas, but giving us some wonderful, well-written and excellently cast characters to spend time with on Christmas.

91 – Christmas in Connecticut

Sometimes I think that every classic Christmas movie involves World War II.

92 – It’s A Wonderful Life

Every. Classic. Christmas. Movie.

93 – A Christmas Story

OK. Maybe not this one.

94 – Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer

I forgot about the part where Rudolph shoots down the German bombers.

Kidding.

95 – Guardians of the Galaxy

96 – Love Actually

97 – Suddenly

98 – Jiro Dreams of Sushi

An amazing documentary. I love films that show process, but this film also showed dedication and drive.

But it was a different sort of persistence and determination than you would see in a western version of a similar story. This was a movie about the banality of passionate dedication. About how people get up, go to work, and hone their craft day in and day out to become amazing without being emotionally unstable or self-destructive. Focus without monomania.

Inspirational. Beautiful. Subtle. Heartfelt. If it had been #100, I would have ended the year here. This movie will also be on my list for 2015.

99 – Ghost World

This was a movie I first watched as a college freshman. I loved it before I had the vocabulary to explain why, and I’m glad to see that I still love it.

100 – Band of Outsiders

101 – The Rocketeer

Trying

My daughter isn’t two weeks old yet, so sometimes she doesn’t want to sleep at night. When I go take my turn trying to console the angry little tomato while my wife gets an hour or three of rest, I know that there is one thing I cannot do that would calm this child down: lactate.

She’s hungry, I can’t feed her, and there’s nothing I can do to stop the wailing and gnashing of gums.

But I have to try and calm her down.

Sometimes I get a moment where she stops crying to burp. Sometimes she’ll even sleep for minutes or (right now I can’t believe this is happening) an hour. Or sometimes she’ll still be bright red but will stop gasping and protesting long enough to take a few good breaths. All of those belong in the win column, even if they don’t mean I get to go to sleep quite yet.

When I sit down to work on yet another draft of something, I try not to think that this will be the time I fix all the problems. It probably won’t. I may not even fix a single problem, and actually create five new ones.

But I have to try and put words on the page.

If I go in with the enthusiasm that this time will be different, and this time will make everything perfect, I’m setting myself up for disappointment. But if I believe that I might not make any real progress and can still push ahead, that sets me up to feel like I at least accomplished the attempt. That I can mark off one more day in the chain of trying.

The Hagakure talks about how a retainer should go into battle believing they are already dead so that they do not act as if they fear death. This is maybe a little morbid of a working motto to attach oneself to.

Brian Eno has a more moderate line:

“The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.”

It’s a quote I keep up on the wall to remind me that not every day will have an epiphany. Not every run will be a personal best. And now I need to remember that every silly song or diaper check will not necessarily be the thing that calms the ferocious infant.

But that shouldn’t stop me from trying.

Baby Steps

My wife was in her second trimester when we received the notice that our rent would be increased (again). It was time to move, even if she wouldn’t be able to help with the heavy lifting. While we were fortunate to find a better apartment quickly, there was still a catch: They wouldn’t wait until our current lease was up and we’d need to pay a month of double rent.

In an effort to control costs, and to try to turn a series of negatives into a positive, we decided that I’d try to move the majority of our stuff slowly, over the course of that month, using our Honda Fit.

And so it began. A little at a time. One or two car loads a day, day after mercifully mild August day. On a single trip down the three flights of stairs to the car, carrying a box of random kitchen gadgets or a lamp, it would feel like the task was never going to get done. The Honda Fit may be aptly named (especially when you fold down the back seat), but we had accumulated a lot of things over the last five years of living together, along with the new things for our family-member-to-be.

Any time I wasn’t busy schlepping was earmarked for working on the last sprint of a script draft. This schedule didn’t offer a chance for many uninterrupted writing days. I would get an hour here, maybe 20 minutes one day. If I completed a scene, it was a victory.

The friction was greater in both situations, because every day I’d have to go through the process of convincing myself to get started, even though I knew I wouldn’t have the time or energy to do all that much that day. I knew that to fill up the car one time, I’d need to make 10-15 trips up and down those stairs. I knew that the distance to “Fade Out.” was still a long ways away even if I saw a good daily bump in my page count.

But the jobs got done. Friction can work in your favor, too, like erosion. A persistent chipping away at a massive project produces more results than inaction. Sometimes your sense of how well your work is going doesn’t matter so long as you keep at it. You’re too close, too stressed, too scattered, or too… anything, really. You don’t always know what you’re capable of until it’s done.

And it starts this way for all of us. Learning to walk. Learning to speak. Learning to breathe. Even before we know we’re working towards something larger, we’re taking small steps.

It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the fear of missing out, or the fear of moving too slowly. While on my way to teach the other day, I saw an investment company advertisement with a picture of a baby which seemed to scream at commuters: “If your baby is already born and you haven’t saved enough for their college education, you’re a failure, and they will be, too.” It’s a message designed to reinforce the idea that it’s impossible to keep up with life, but you should still break yourself trying.

Right now I’m working on taking satisfaction from finishing what I start. Setting goals and making progress toward them, even if it may not move as fast as I want. I’m working on taking satisfaction from the doing. If I can do that, then the friction of moving in smaller increments could become the joy of persistent meaningful effort.

It just may take a little longer than I expect it to.

Run in the Rain

Don’t check the weather to see if tomorrow might be nicer outside. Lace up your shoes. Cut through the grass and feel the soft, wet earth cushion your stride. Run through puddles. Hop over puddles. Let the rain cool you off as you push forward.

Don’t worry about not using your headphones or electronics. Listen to the sound of your feet against the pavement. See how quiet you can make yourself. Listen to the patter of droplets falling through the leaves above you. Smell the flowers.

So many things we want to do wind up not getting done because the conditions aren’t right, or we don’t think we’re prepared enough.

You can’t always change the environment to exactly suit your needs, but you are always capable of not caring if things are perfect.

Godzilla, Godzilla, And My Dad

When I was young, my dad introduced me to a lot of older sci-fi and horror movies. Films like Frankenstein, Godzilla, and Them! Being the little guy I was, some things scared me. Giant bugs, for example, were particularly freaky for me.

And that’s when these movies became a teachable moment.

My dad would talk to me about what the people making the movies were afraid of. In these three examples, there is the common undertone of the fear of science gone out of control; of the consequences of man trying to play God and master the forces of the natural world. This changed how I looked at stories, even from that early age.

And that’s how I approached the new Godzilla. Sure, I went to a screening on the biggest screen I could find and sat almost uncomfortably close (because I’m not a complete unfeeling, analytical film droid. I like explosions.), but I also knew that the original Godzilla has a special place in my film-loving heart. It’s allegory about the perils of the nuclear age and the terrible responsibilities of those who pursue scientific knowledge was part of the Rosetta Stone of my movie-going life.

As the credits rolled, I sat for a moment and thought about what was beneath the surface of this movie. If the original was about the awesome fear of annihilation by our own hand, what was this new vision representative of?

I thought about the shots comparing the scale of objects, and toying with the audience’s perceptions. A roach climbing over a toy tank. Ford holding a small action figure of a soldier that kinda, sorta resembles him. A close up shot of a lizard, followed by soldiers moving behind it, towering over it. And then comparing these moments to the shots of humans the size of pinpoints being washed away by tidal waves, or smashed or dropped from great heights. Or the shots from a human point of view showing pieces of the mammoth beasts, obscuring their full size because they’re just too big to be taken in at once.

And I thought about the moments where the creatures seem to directly interact with the humans. There are few. These aren’t monsters maliciously stomping on buildings or eating people. We’re not even important enough to be their food source (they prefer radiation). There are a few moments when Godzilla himself seems to make eye contact with a human, but it’s implied by all the previous moments that it’s not really contact, but maybe a form of curiosity. The way that a human might look at a small bird, or try to understand the actions of a swarm of insects.

We are not the biggest force in our ecosystem. We, too, are small.

The movie further reinforces this idea with the actual actions of the humans, and how any action they take only makes things worse. Humans accidentally excavated the MUTO creatures from their dormant hiding place underground. Humans created the nuclear resources that give the MUTO a food supply that was no longer a natural part of the ecosystem. Humans moved a MUTO cocoon to a site of nuclear waste disposal, setting up more carnage when what was in that cocoon awakened. Humans attempted to set up a nuclear warhead to destroy the creatures, but in doing so accidentally created a situation where they needed to deactivate that same warhead when the creatures took it to use as an incubator for their young.

We are small. Our actions are insignificant to these larger creatures. We are hopeless against them and must trust that they will strike a balance that doesn’t destroy us in the process.

At this point, my mind shifted to Pacific Rim, another movie in the kaiju tradition. While there is a moment in the opening narration of this movie that seems to mimic Godzilla (2014), where humans need to use multiple nuclear weapons to bring down a single kaiju monster, the movie quickly diverges to a more optimistic message.

Together we are strong. Together, we can become as big and strong as the challenges we face and topple them. The movie reinforces this theme time and again, from requiring a team of pilots in each towering jaeger robot to highlighting the way that isolationist strategies (like the building of defensive walls) are inadequate.

There are other important differences (for example, the kaiju of Pacific Rim are intentionally malicious towards humans and are sent by an invading force as exterminators), but this difference in underlying theme and dramatic purpose is what I kept thinking about. Pacific Rim was about characters learning to work together and sacrifice together in order to protect humanity as a whole. Godzilla (2014) is about humanity realizing it is at the mercy of forces out of its control, and our best option may be to move to Kansas.

And then I think about Dr. Serizawa from the original Godzilla, and how he not only makes the Oxygen Destroyer weapon that ultimately kills Godzilla, but how he sacrifices himself in triggering the weapon to make sure that the secret of his powerful weapon dies with him. It supports the theme of the film that scientific progress can produce things of benefit, but that they can also be used for terrible purposes. The Oxygen Destroyer stops a rampaging monster, but it could have been used to cause even more devastation than the monster itself.

Take this a step further: In the American dubbing, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the suggestion is that Dr. Serizawa dies with the weapon so that it doesn’t fall into “the wrong hands.” In the original, there are no right hands for a weapon of this power, and Dr. Serizawa believes it is too great a power to be wielded by any human. For an American audience, already entrenched in a Cold War and aware that it recently deployed the fearful atomic weapons that spawned Godzilla, this change shifts the theme to a have your cake and eat it to philosophy that man can create great and terrible weapons that should not exist, but if they do exist, let’s all agree that we know who should wield them.

Putting it all together, this new Godzilla is all about feeling small, weak, and powerless in the face of something ancient and unexplainable. Something natural. Something with as much interest in us as a hurricane or an earthquake does. And there’s nothing we can do about it but surrender.

Except for one thing.

Ford Brody: Indestructible Action Figure

This new Godzilla owes several things to the American dubbing of the original. For one, there’s an American point of view character who just happens to be present for every important moment. In Godzilla, King of the Monsters! this was done by filming new scenes with Raymond Burr and having lots of shots of him looking at things or having an interpreter explain things to him. It’s a clumsy device, but it helped to ground the story for an American audience that distributors thought would be averse to subtitles.

Godzilla (2014) is less clumsy in how it motivates the reasons why Ford is always in the center of the action. He’s at the site of the first monster event because his father lead him there. The second event happens midway between home and Japan, following the path of the monsters. And finally, he volunteers for a mission to try and stop the monsters because it’s the only way to quickly get back to his wife and son. So far, so good.

But in order to balance his ability to act as the audience’s point of identification while also keeping his story engaging, the film puts him in life threatening danger at regular intervals. And he always walks away. After being almost thrown from a train, knocked off a suspension bridge, and being thrown forward by a gas explosion, he winds up with a single crutch and a few scrapes and bruises that fail to suggest that he spent the last 48 hours in a constant struggle for his life.

Because he needs to end the movie kissing the also lightly scraped and mussed Elle Brody, and everybody should look Apocalypse Pretty for that moment… But that’s another train of thought.

By making Ford so indestructible, the movie undercuts it’s own message. “Humanity needs to reconsider its place in the food chain, except for this guy.”

And expand on this to look at a recurring image throughout the movie: families separating and reuniting. If the movie focuses on a family being separated, that family makes it out OK in the end. Every time.

“Humanity needs to reconsider its place in the food chain, except for this one guy… And his family… And any other family we focus on.”

The movie creates a sense that some people are safe by virtue of them having loved ones they are separated from. It undercuts its sense of fear and chaos by suggesting an ordered world that dulls the audience’s sense of pain.

Compare this to Pacific Rim, where not only do characters die, but characters we care about. Their death, and willingness to face it, helps define them. Or the original Godzilla, where time is spent focusing on a woman and her children about to be crushed by the terrible beast.

The woman gathers her children to her and tells them not to be afraid, because they’ll soon be with their father. And we weep for them, because in that one moment we identify with them. Their death has meaning because it touches us. The film focuses on them not to make us feel safe and comforted, but to advance the film’s theme about the horrors of the forces humanity has unleashed, and the human toll.

There are no such moments in the new Godzilla. Humans are either viewed from afar like ants under a boot or focused on so we can feel their relief at having survived.

There’s another thing I learned about watching movies with my dad: skepticism with humor. We were our own Mystery Science Theater for plenty of movies in his collection of 50s and 60s sci-fi movies. A lot of it focused on the rickety and obvious craftsmanship of those movies. Spotting the wires. Recognizing a costume from another movie. Pointing out where you could see the breaks in the illusion.

That had an influence on me, too, but not as quickly. It kept me always thinking about how these are created stories. They don’t just happen. Everything that happens is a choice, successful or otherwise.

Maybe now I snark a little less while watching the movie. A little. But a lot of how I learned to watch movies comes from those days spent on the couch with my dad and his VHS collection.

So when I sit down to watch Godzilla, I think about watching those other movies with him. And I think about how in the near future I’m going to have somebody new to the world to share these things with. I doubt I’ll make them sit through Robot Monster 3D, but at some point they’ll meet Godzilla. And maybe their dad will calm their fears by telling them about why these monsters on the screen exist.

It’s because the people making these movies are scared, too. But we can be a little less scared if we know we’re not alone in our fear.